It was concluded in a recent investigation that the Dolch list of basic sight words has outlived its usefulness. The 220 most frequent words on the Kucera-Francis Corpus were offered as a substitute-for the Dolch list. It was assumed that young children's oral vocabularies included a higher number of Corpus words than Dolch words.
This study focused on the above assumption by investigating whether the Dolch list or Corpus list was more common to the oral vocabularies of beginning readers (ages five, six, and seven). Both word lists were compared to the Wepman-Hass spoken word count. The results indicated that young children's spoken vocabularies contained significantly more Dolch words than Kucera-Francis words.
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